Visualization of information spaces to retrieve and browse image data

Abstract

We have developed a user interface for similarity-based image retrieval, where the distribution of retrieved data in a high-dimensional feature space is represented as a dynamical scatter diagram of thumbnail images in a 3-dimensional visualization space and similarities between data are represented as sizes in the 3-dimensional space. Coordinate systems in the visualization space are obtained by statistical calculations on the distribution of feature vectors of retrieved images. Our system provides some different transformations from a high-dimensional feature space to a 3-dimensional space that give different coordinate systems to the visualization space. By changing the coordinates automatically at some intervals, a spatial-temporal pattern of the distribution of images is generated. Furthermore a hierarchical coordinate system that consists of some local coordinate systems based on key images can be defined in the visualization space. These methods can represent a large number of retrieved results in a way that users can grasp intuitively.